Field
The present technology relates to systems and methods for accessing digital data. More particularly, the technology relates to computer architecture and operating methods that can enable decoders or players to access digital data.
Description of the Related Art
Digital data capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless communication devices such as radio telephone handsets, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, video gaming devices, video game consoles, data servers, and the like. Digital devices implement image and video encoding techniques or formats such as JPEG, GIF, RAW, TIFF, PBM, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264/MPEG-4, Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), to store, transmit and receive digital images and video efficiently. Digital devices implement audio encoding techniques or formats such as, AAC, MP3, and WAV to store, transmit, and receive digital audio efficiently. Digital devices implement additional data and graphics encoding techniques or formats such as IGES, 3DT, PS, MNG, ODF, HDF5, NetCDF, and SVG. Digital devices implement document, spreadsheet, and presentation formats such as PowerPoint, PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and the like. Digital devices further implement proprietary data storage formats for storage of scientific or other data.
Digital data are commonly encoded prior to transmission or storage by an encoder, e.g., a server. The encoding typically consists of operations such as compression or organization into a selected format. The digital data may be independently stored or provided to a user. Alternatively, the digital data may be embedded in other digital data. For instance, an image, video, data, or animation may be part of an electronic news article, electronic slideshow, or technical paper. In either case, the digital data must be accessed, that is, decoded or interpreted prior to display or play by accessors resident on devices such as mobile devices, DVD players, Blu-Ray players, TV sets, tablets, laptops, computers, or set top boxes. However, a particular accessor may not support decoding or interpreting of the format used by the encoder. For example, the format used by the encoder may be a legacy format no longer supported or may be a new format that the accessor does not yet support. This presents challenges to the content generator or archivist who wishes to ensure that the digital data are always accessible.
Since different access techniques may support different formats, the traditional solutions are to either: encode the digital data in many different formats to support many different decoders/interpreters; or to select a single format in which to encode a particular type of data. As examples of the latter approach, all images may be converted to a GIF format, or all text documents may be converted to rich text format or pdf format. In both cases, decoding and re-encoding of digital data can lead to loss in quality and content. Furthermore, the former case requires additional storage for the copies of the data in the various formats, while the latter case relies on a single accessor, that is, player or interpreter, always being supported on all platforms.
Fully Configurable Video Coding is a new approach to video codec implementation that builds on the strengths of MPEG RVC and adaptive video coding techniques. A common platform-independent decoding engine, can be configured to decode any video sequence or syntax. An encoder sends a set of configuration commands which define a video decoding process in terms of a set of primitive operations and interconnections. The decoding engine receives these configuration commands and creates corresponding decoding objects to implement the required decoding functions. Video is then decoded by stepping through these decoding objects. This approach is more fully described in Bystrom, et al, A Fully Re-Configurable Universal Video Decoder, presented at the Design and Architectures for Signal and Imaging Processing Conference in 2009, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. Additional work was discussed in Richardson, et al, A Framework for Fully Configurable Video Coding, presented at the Picture Coding Symposium in 2009, which is also hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.